The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (36 page)

I was very grateful for the inspector’s sympathy but he was wrong. Despite my mother’s
pleading, my father refused to allow me to return to our flat. I was banished to my
grandparent’s apartment, one floor below, and permitted to finish the semester at
Robert College but then sent away to school in London after Ramazan. London wasn’t
so bad but compared to life in Istanbul the city lacked energy and joy. I rode the
ferry once to Calais and back but couldn’t even read the
Guardian
I had bought at the terminal and the water was ugly. After I matriculated, I was allowed
to return to Istanbul to enter university. Like every other student from the city,
I live at home, but home still means my grandparents’ flat. The difference is, now
it’s my choice to stay with my grandparents. I will never live with my father again.
It’s very strange, of course. I see my mother and brothers and sisters all the time
and our relationship is normal. I see my father too, but only in passing. We do not
speak. We have never reconciled. Does he forgive me? What am I to think? Do I forgive
him? You understand—I cannot. But I can tell you, your world fills with pain when
you find it impossible to forgive your father, your worst suspicions about life confirmed.

Despite his daring behavior the night of her birthday party, Osman’s boldness had
receded to something more gentle and patient. They dated in a mannerly, cerebral fashion,
chaste and sweet, with guarded hearts and cautious optimism, for less than two months,
tacitly avoiding their respective friends, not secretively but perhaps selfishly,
and she had never done these things before—taken his hand into hers and held it, thrown
her arm around his neck to kiss him fully, with a fevered eagerness that seemed to
blot out her mind. With their lips pressed together, in the back of his throat he
began to laugh, a tender chuckling that seemed to express to her another type of fondness,
as if he were offering a caress not just to the fact of
her,
but to the reality of
them.

What?
she whispered, releasing just enough pressure to let him speak without separating
her mouth from his. You should kiss me again, she said, encouraged by the approach
of twilight, and they embraced until the ferry docked in Besiktas, the hillsides rising
above the coast snowy with pink-flowering Judas trees.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She let him know that in the morning she had a swim meet with her school team and
shouldn’t stay out late and when he said he would come to cheer her on she told him,
Sorry, no men allowed.

They walked along the shoreline of the silvery Bosphorus, its surface quilted with
spangles, and she fancied each gleam off the water a knowing complicitous wink in
her direction, an affirmation of the newfound fullness in her heart. Following the
promenade below the gardens of Yildiz Park, they turned eventually back into the city
to Ortakoy, to the cafés where everyone they knew could be found on a Friday night,
wedged like electrons around the sticky nuclei of little tables, playing chess or
backgammon, strumming acoustic guitars, sipping tea, floating in the heat of laughter
and conversation, arguments and prophecy delivered with outlandish gravity.

Sometimes she and Osman would meet up in Ortakoy on weekends but would never arrive
together as they did tonight. They climbed the stairs above a gift shop to a café
named Gizgi, a preferred hangout, a tiny place with only ten tables, all low to the
ground. Two of the tables were pulled together nearby a third occupied by Yesho and
Jacqueline, hosting an invasion of older boys whom the girls seemed to be snubbing—or
vice versa. They were Osman’s friends, she saw, Karim among them, and Osman greeted
them warmly and wedged into their circle. Most were university students she didn’t
recognize, not the usual pack of lycée puppies taunted by her brazen girlfriends,
who yanked her down between them with a theatrical sense of urgency.

Uh-oh, said Yesho, murmuring but sounding dire, waggling her head side to side with
misgiving—perhaps teasing, perhaps not. The minute you walk in with this guy, I see
it in your eyes.

Jacqueline leaned forward and tilted her head away from the boys, looking past Dottie
to Yesho, nodding agreement if not approval. She is in love, yes? she said, speaking
behind her cupped hand. Oh my God. Terrible.

Yes, Yesho concurred. Terrible.

Dottie laughed without admitting anything and tried to accustom herself to Yesho’s
new look, her haystack thatch of yam-colored hair dyed back to its original raven
black and cut à la
Cleopatra, her forehead a full chop of bangs, helmetlike swoops on each side of her
chin, the effect pushed to its extreme with kohl-lined eyes, fake eyelashes, and butterfly
blue shadow, glossed lips, a half-buttoned gauze blouse over a red sports bra, gold
harem pants—a performance that had earned Yesho a new sobriquet from Elena—Queen of
the Vile. (And where was Elena? Dottie wondered. Still with family at synagogue?)
As for Jacqueline, she seemed to be firing back at Yesho with a Parisian dominatrix
fantasy, mostly done in leather—miniskirt, thigh-high boots, elbow-length gloves,
studded biker’s jacket over a black camisole, black lipstick and nails, a beret atop
her lengthening Goldilocks curls. To Dottie, tonight they both seemed trapped in the
flamboyance of their provocations, since the boys weren’t paying the slightest attention
to either of them. Even Osman seemed to have defected to the island of male indifference,
and she felt a twinge of peevishness at the sudden push of distance between them,
realizing that in all likelihood he had arranged to meet his friends here tonight.

For a moment she looked around, until her eyes met Karim’s, mercurial and sunken with
permanent suspicion yet pooled deep with a desire she could not fail to notice, and
she averted her gaze from his before he misunderstood her curiosity as encouragement—she
had chosen Osman, hadn’t she?—and lowered her head, intrigued but uneasy. Except for
Karim, she knew not one of them by name, and none appeared to be card-carrying members
of the
entel
crowd, the chums she would expect Osman to rendezvous with on a Friday night to discuss
books and art and music. A few of them had grown the thin ear-to-ear beards of the
imams—strange but okay, Turkish men had a fetish for facial hair—but the bumpkin clothes,
chosen without any deference to style, and crude haircuts like you get when you’re
a child, and just the mood, there was something about the mood she found bothersome.

Where’s Elena? she asked, and Yesho sat up straight and said loudly that Elena had
left because Karim and his friends had insulted her.

Seriously? said Dottie, and Yesho told her, Don’t play so innocent, exchanging smirks
with a boy who looked over at her. Yes, seriously. Because she is a Jew.

Jacqueline, still whispering, interjected to declare it was Elena’s own fault, unable
to hold her tongue when the boys, immersed in politics, found themselves suddenly
being made fun of. Hey, ayatollah, Elena had badgered them. Ayatollah, hey—when you
are going to Afghanistan? So they say dirty kike, Zionist bitch, explained Jacqueline,
and she leave.

You know very well why this is disaster, said Yesho, dropping her voice again so the
boys would not overhear. Osman, he is a Muslim.

But this objection made no sense to Dottie; almost everyone in Turkey was a Muslim,
devout or not, yet the only religion she had ever known Osman to practice was as an
Atatürkçu, a follower of Kemalism, which made him a rather ordinary Istanbullus. He
was committed to progress (or so she thought, until his rant about the mayor) and
secularism and the enlightened modernizing ideals of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the man
she had heard her father describe as the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century.
The Turks spoke of Atatürk as a god, though you could say whatever you wanted about
God. Osman a Muslim? Hardly
. . .
at least not with any apparent level of allegiance. Osman liked his beer and raki
and cognac, and she had never seen him enter a mosque, or prostrate himself toward
Mecca when the muezzins called out
ezan
from their minarets five times each day, and his regard for females was nothing, she
could report firsthand, if not healthy, liberated from the absurd sanctions of Islam.

What are you saying, said Dottie. You’re a Muslim yourself!

Yes, of course, said Yesho, technically we are all Muslims, but not like these Anatolian
shepherds, who want to dominate the woman and keep everybody ignorant and throw us
backward. You have been in my country long enough to understand.

You can’t possibly be talking about Osman, she said, but Yesho snorted and rolled
her eyes and shrugged as if to say, Wait and see.

Coup, coup, coup,
said Jacqueline like a shrieking bird. She was not born to suffer the disaffection
of men. I am bored with this coup. Six years and they can’t shut up about the coup,
and she lit a cigarette and stood up, exhaling a beam of smoke at the university students,
who leered back at her audacity, eyes violent with lust, and went to the other end
of the room to flirt with a German hippie, one of the regulars at Gizgi, playing a
guitar.

They are stupid, these boys, said Yesho, obviously too impassioned to care that Jacqueline
was abandoning them. They don’t want to be Turks. Turks like Israel. Why not? The
Arabs are no good for either of us. These boys dream to be Saudi or Afghani or something
uncivilized. They want to hate. And don’t tell me nonsense about head scarves. This
is a trick to make all the women live under a black sheet. I can’t believe, you know,
that Osman join this stupid group.
What group?
interrupted Dottie, but her friend was not listening. Temper rising, Yesho spoke directly
to the student who kept staring at her with undisguised contempt. Hey, you stupid
boy, she said, parroting the opinion of her father, a colonel in the army. Who are
the humans whose rights we are abusing? We don’t abuse true humans, only animals.

Yesho, my God! Dottie protested.

The discussion among the university students stopped and they glowered like stage
villains at the girls’ table until, a moment later, Karim smiled, his hollow-cheeked
expression black with ridicule, looked back at his friends, and said in his high-pitched
voice, Excuse me, did someone hear a whore speaking? and so the feud escalated, Yesho
and Karim trading slander and imprecations in English and Turkish, several of the
other boys enjoining the battle while Osman, who would not look over at Dottie, appeared
moribund, seemingly dazed by the cannon bursts of hostility, lost between factions.

And then like falling dominoes the
chirr
of conversations throughout the café went silent with the spreading awareness of
a pair of newcomers looming a step inside the doorway. Two brawny gendarmes exuding
a cocky sense of authority began working their way down the line of tables to check
IDs, their boots resounding on the wooden floor, their hands outstretched like mendicants
demanding alms, a harassment of the city’s youth that routinely meant you were sent
home if you were unable to prove who you were.

Which everyone in the club was able to do except, for some inexplicable reason, Osman,
who riffled through his shoulder bag and dug through his pockets but could not find
his government registration card. Dottie, waving her American passport at the police,
tried in vain to vouch for him, then insisted she would go along too when it became
clear that the police, each with a hand clawed on Osman’s shoulders, seemed intent
on arresting him. He turned once to look at her, signaling with a jerk of his head
no, his eyes warning her not to get involved, but she had not been raised to accede
to a position of helplessness in the world.

This isn’t right, she said to Yesho. Is this what you were defending?

Calm down, said Yesho, unchastened. It’s normal. It’s no problem. It’s his own fault,
yes?

What has he done? she demanded, bounding to her feet, her eyes briefly pleading with
the two tables of hapless students until she understood how cowed and useless they
were and she turned away with a grimace of disappointment, shadowing the police to
the door, the agglutinated Turkish words tumbling awkwardly into her mouth from the
top of her throat. Where are you taking him? He’s my boyfriend. He did nothing wrong.
He lives near Sultanahmet. I will take him home.

Osman stopped, his expression desolate with resignation, and looked slowly around,
over her head, back into the café, to tell Karim to please accompany her back to Uskudar
but by now her defiance was full-spirited and she could not hear this request as anything
but an empty patriarchal mannerism—
I can take care of myself,
she seethed, spinning around to reject Karim’s assistance—and followed the police
as they nudged Osman ahead onto the stairs and down to the street. They marched to
their patrol car and she skipped in front of them to ask their names and ranks, her
hand fishing in her camera bag for a pen and scrap of paper. Osman turned on his heels
and rasped,
Dottie, go home, please, I will telephone you. Please,
and she said,
This is such bullshit.
He saw her begin to pull her camera out and commanded her to put it away.
I’m going to call my father,
she said
.
The police opened the rear door and Osman, as he ducked into the backseat, met her
eyes fiercely and said,
Dottie, no. Dottie? Listen, promise me you will not do that,
and then the car was splitting the flow of pedestrians as she scribbled the number
of the license plate on the inside of a matchbook and a hand was pulling her arm and
she wheeled around infuriated to confront whoever it was and there was Karim.

Come, he said. I will take you back to Uskudar.

She ran into the street, flagging taxis until one stopped, and Karim, nonplussed,
scurried in beside her. She told the driver to follow the police, but the patrol car
had disappeared up the avenue, and she said she wanted to be taken to the nearest
gendarmerie. Karim, finding his voice, asked her sardonically what she planned to
do, and Dottie said, I’m going to get him back.

Please, said Karim, you cannot understand. These police, they are like criminals.
The regime imprisons and tortures thousands of people. They do what they please.

No, she said, you don’t understand.

The taxi dropped them at the Ortakoy police station, where Karim pulled her aside
and tried to persuade her that her attitude was dangerous, asking to get them all
in more trouble than she could guess, that the best thing to do until morning was
what Osman had asked them to do, and she stared back at him wordlessly and then shook
free from his grasp and went inside.

Behind the front desk the duty officer, an older, jowly man with benevolent eyes and
a droopy salt-and-pepper mustache, greeted her as if her presence before him was an
unthinkable pleasure, and she said, Please, can you help me, and explained her situation.
My dear, he said graciously, I can tell you for certain, your friend is not here.
She produced the matchbook on which she had written the number of the patrol car and
he studied it for a moment and handed it back. Not our boys, he said. This must be
a Besiktas registration.

She thanked him effusively for his kindness and left, whisking past Karim-No-Balls,
Karim-the-Pigeon-Hearted, son of Abu Jellyfish, as she stepped, waving, back into
the street, yet hesitating before she closed the taxi’s door, her voice cold as she
asked Karim if he was coming. He came but sat pressed against the door like a bony
mannequin, more high-strung than virile, this guy, not venturing to speak, his eyes
straight ahead and she offered him nothing. At the Besiktas station she paid the driver
and dashed for the entrance but Karim outpaced her, blocking the way, and they looked
into each other’s angry eyes until she, haughtily, said, Well?

Do you know what you are doing?

Do you? she challenged.

Okay, so, he said, tentative, then summoning enough nerve or pride to open the glass
door.
Allahu akbar.